A custodian of memory | Pinnacle Newsletter #3
#3 A custodian of memory
In memory of Ian Roddie, 1938-2018
If you were wondering why there was no newsletter last week, it's because I was in the cancer ward at Boston Pilgrim hospital, spending some time with my dad in his last days.
Although his death was not unexpected by the time it came, it has hit us all very hard. I'm 31 years old – not yet old enough, I suspect, to fully understand all the gifts he gave me and my brother.
The task of evaluating, sorting and archiving his lifetime's creative output has fallen to me. Ian Roddie wrote several full-length novels that were never published, and ever since 1985 he has kept a detailed daily diary. My entire childhood is contained within it, along with good chunks of my adult life. This responsibility is one I feel keenly. I care about preservation, ephemera and history, and particularly about this history.
Today I began sorting through several hundred Kodachromes dating back to the late 1950s. As the images came to life on my light table – many of them images I had never seen before, or at least not since some dimly remembered childhood slide show – I marvelled at how perfectly the rich colours and sharp details emerged from decades in the past to stir recognition or emotion. Slides labelled 'TORQUAY 1965' looked as if they could have been captured yesterday. The image quality is, in many cases, exquisite.
Several years ago, my dad began an attempt to digitise some of these slides, but the digital output was lousy: dynamic range reduced, fine details smudged, colours wrecked. Those scans were decaying from that moment, saved as lossy JPEGs and stored on a hard drive that will be technoscrap in a few years, the start of a journey into digital oblivion. But the original transparencies are as close to immortal as any photographs can be. If properly stored, they will last for decades or perhaps even centuries.
^^^ This scan is a poor depiction of the original slide.
Can the same be said of the digital images we create in their thousands? They will fill ephemeral storage media and short-lived cloud storage containers (I doubt Dropbox or Facebook will be around in fifty years). Some will fall through the gaps in the internet or vanish during hardware failures. Others will disappear when a password is forgotten or the original owner dies and a computer can no longer be accessed. Perhaps decades from now our DSLRs' RAW files will be as incomprehensible to future computers as hieroglyphics are to you and me.
But a Kodachrome can always be viewed by holding it up to the light.
^^^ This is the cabin of my dad's boat, Yorrel. He built Yorrel by hand in the 1970s but I never saw it. This photo is valuable because it provides an insight into the character of the man before I was even born.
We have no way of knowing what will be important in fifty years to our children, grandchildren, or even future historians. My dad had no way of knowing that when he clicked the shutter on board his boat in 1974 I would one day marvel at the resulting image and find it precious beyond words.
My point isn't that film is better. My point is that our everyday creative output might not seem like much now, but we have no way of knowing who will find it important in the future.
I will publish a longer, more considered eulogy for my dad on my blog when the time is right, but for now I hope these words convey the respect and love I have for him, and the deep sense of privilege that comes from being the custodian of his writings and photographs.
Until next time,
Alex
www.alexroddie.com